One Weird, One Warped
by Tajjas
Summary: Two members of the Leverage team crossed paths over a decade before the team was actually formed.
1. One Weird, One Warped

**One Weird, One Warped**

_This popped into my head watching the beginning of the Second David Job…what if the team had crossed paths before?_

_Just a one-shot, too much other stuff in progress right now to make it more. Takes place pre-Leverage._

* * * * *

Alec shifted backwards, away from the images of various baby animals that Anna and Marie were busy cooing over, and checked his watch. The traveling exhibit that Nana had decided that they needed to see—something about 'culture'—opened in half an hour, which gave him _just_ enough time—

"What do you think you're doing, boy?!"

He jumped back guiltily at Nana's sharp words, but her focus was on Ricky and the images he'd been drawing on one of the glass cases a few feet to her left. In _spit_, no less. The kid was going to die at the ripe old age of eleven if he didn't quit doing stupid shit like that.

"Do you think the people that work here have nothing better to do than clean up your messes?!"

Nana gave Ricky's ear a twist, pulling him away from the display case, and Alec winced in sympathy for his foster brother. Ricky might be a pain in the ass who wouldn't keep his hands out of Alec's stuff no matter _what_ he was threatened with, but Alec knew firsthand just how much that particular grip hurt.

"Well?" Nana demanded, fingers still latched on Ricky's ear. "Did you hear me? Look at me when I'm speaking to you, boy!"

"Yes, ma'am. I mean, no, ma'am, I don't think—"

"You _didn't_ think, that's for certain." She released his ear and produced a tissue from her purse, shoving it at him. "Now clean that up." She shook her head and continued glaring as he hurriedly did as she'd ordered. "You just wait until we get home."

Alec considered. It wasn't a good idea to antagonize her when she already annoyed, but who knew when the next time he'd be at the museum was. Sure, he could do it from anywhere, but it wouldn't be as much fun if he wasn't here to see it, that had been the whole point of waiting rather than doing it as soon as the system was active. And once they'd gone into the special exhibit, there was no _way_ that she'd let him wander off. "Nana?"

"_What?_"

"I need to use the bathroom."

"Me too!" a little voice immediately chimed in, and Alec sent up a silent thanks for four-year olds as Marie's words drew Nana's gaze away from him.

Almost as soon as the words were out of her mouth, Marie had begun shifting from leg to leg, lending credence to her words, and Nana gave Ricky another sharp look. She was obviously unwilling to leave him alone to finish his task, which was probably wise, but….

"I'll take her," Anna offered after a moment.

"All right," Nana agreed reluctantly. She split her glare between Anna and Alec. "But you had better be back here in fifteen minutes, or I'll skin the both of you when we get home, you understand me?" A quick and much less threatening glare was directed at Marie. "And you stay with Anna."

"Yes, Nana," all three chorused together.

"What are you planning?" Anna muttered under her breath as they made their way out of the African Mammal exhibit hall and towards the bathrooms. Marie—despite her insistence that she needed to go—kept getting distracted by shiny things in the cases they were passing so it was safe enough to talk.

Alec considered. At sixteen, Anna was two years older than he was and had been living with Nana nearly as long, meaning that she knew him about as well as anyone did, but….well, she was way too goody two-shoes for his tastes. Real hall monitor material. He shrugged. "What makes you think I'm planning something?"

"Because normally you'd pitch a bigger fit than _Ricky_ if Nana announced we were going to spend an entire day wandering around a natural history museum. This time, nothing."

Damn. It was a good thing Nana had been busy getting Marie settled in and hadn't caught that. "Maybe I thought the exhibit sounded interesting."

Anna snorted. "The World of the Incas? _Please_."

"Oh, look, there's the women's room."

Marie apparently remembered her need to use the restroom again, tugging Anna insistently towards the door.

"Alec, you start causing trouble in a _museum_ and Nana is going to whip the tar out of you," Anna hissed, turning back to glare at him. "_Again_."

He continued down the hall, ostensibly towards the men's room. "See you in fifteen minutes."

* * * * *

There were four guards on this wing, spaced out relatively evenly and taking an average of ten minutes each to circle the hall. That gave him just under a two minute window in which to work. Given that he'd gone through similar setups in less than twenty seconds, Eliot wasn't worried. Kind of annoyed that he was doing such a simple job, but after the hit his reputation had taken less than a month ago….

He did one more slow scan of the hall, ostensibly checking a map of the museum as he did so. Five closed circuit cameras, one of them pointing in the general direction of his case he'd be stealing from, but he already knew about that. He'd have his back to it for the most part, and even so, the odds of whatever poor sap was stuck watching an entire bank of cameras for hours on end noticing him in that twenty second window were pretty low. And if he did notice…well, security would be alerted anyway when the new security system went off. It had something to do with computers; all he'd really understood from the article was that the thing would go off when the weight changed, and without knowing the exact weight of what he was stealing, there was no way he could keep that from happening.

He folded the map back up, or tried to, anyway, since the damn things never would go back to the way they'd been originally, stuck it in his pocket, and ambled towards his target. The fact that the alarms were going to go off was exactly why _he_ was here and not some straight-up thief. Well, that and the fact that he was relatively new to the game, and that he'd had to drop the merchandise from his last job thanks to that damn IYS insurance investigator, so his 'employer' was able to get a retrieval specialist cheap. Freud, Fred, Ford, whatever that bastard's name was, had just about run him to ground…he'd escaped, barely, but even without the merchandise it had taken extreme measures. He ran a hand through close-cropped hair. Someday he _would _be able to command the respect—and the fees—the bigger names could, and that would be the end of these penny-ante jobs.

With a shake of his head, he ran through his assessment of museum security one last time. Worst case scenario and he was noticed as soon as he went to work, they _might_ be able to get six guards in his way before he made it to the door. Eight at the absolute most, if any of them were in the break room, and with a new exhibit opening this afternoon that was pretty damn unlikely. But of those potential eight guards, none of them were armed, and at most they would only be able to reach him in ones and twos. Not exactly challenging, especially since it didn't look like any of them spent much time in the gym.

He examined a pair of ancient wooden earrings for a few minutes before stepping over to the next case, a piece of greenish stone carved into a hair comb. Why Mr. Ellington wanted the thing he had no idea, but…well, it was what he was being paid for. Why didn't really matter.

A casual sweep of his hand across his jacket pocket let him retrieve his pocketknife and open it in one smooth motion. All he had to do now was slip it into the space between the glass and the platform, and—

Alarms screamed around him, lights began to flash, and he clamped down on his immediate reflex to leap backwards. He hadn't _done_ anything yet—his hand was still six inches away from the damn case!

No point in trying for subtlety now that the alarms were going off. He jammed the blade in and forced the casing upwards. It gave almost immediately, and he reached under it to grab the comb before letting the casing fall back down. It landed with a quiet thump that was covered by the sound of the alarm, and he turned for the nearest stairway only to halt as he realized that _all_ of the alarms were going off. Well, not quite _all_…every fifth? Sixth? Something like that, anyway.

He held his position, trying to figure out what was going on as the crowd milled around him in various degrees of confusion and growing panic. Had he managed to rob the museum during some sort of security sweep? That he didn't need, the police turning up in response to some kind of drill, only to have them discover him committing a real crime. But, no, they wouldn't do that during the day, not with paying patrons around…. Was someone else robbing the place? He didn't need _that_ either.

The alarm behind him—the one on the case he'd robbed—abruptly shut off, at the same time the one beside it came on. He looked around. All of the alarms had shifted.

"What the _hell_?" He didn't realize he'd spoken aloud until an older woman gave him a disapproving look, but it wasn't as though he was the only one in the hall echoing that particular sentiment.

The alarms shifted again, and he shook himself as a man in a security uniform hurried past, not even glancing in his direction. Whatever was going on, the best thing for him was to get gone. Eventually someone would figure out what was happening, or at least notice that one of the cases was empty, and when that occurred, he needed to be elsewhere.

Eliot made his way to the balcony overlooking the main floor for a quick look around. It didn't seem like the security guards were stopping anyone from leaving—one of the ones who'd been by the door was heading for the stairs, but they other remained at his post and it seemed as though they were treating the thing as a system glitch. Good, he could use that. Hell, maybe it even _was_ a system glitch; it was being tested, after all.

Scanning the rest of the room below the balcony was more habit than anything else—a quick survey for anything out of the ordinary—and he was a little surprised when his focus landed on a man in a hooded sweatshirt standing beside a bank of phones. The man's back was turned so he couldn't see anything but a dark hand protruding from the sleeve of his sweatshirt, but there was odd something about the way that hand was moving.

His eyes narrowed as he considered the alarms and the quick gestures the man was making. "I'll be damned." Unless he was going insane, the man was _conducting_ the still-shifting alarms.

* * * * *

Alec grinned, tugging his hood down a little more to hide his expression as the alarms continued in a modified version of _Ode to Joy_. He hadn't been sure this would work, especially since he was using a jury-rigged _calculator_—albeit one with a few special additions, but still—to run things through the phone system. It wasn't the best setup he could have imagined, but hauling a computer along would have been just a little obvious.

He couldn't keep his fingers from twitching in time as the alarms shifted into the fast part. It wasn't as clear as he might have liked—he hadn't been able to shift the frequencies enough to hit all of the right notes, for one—but it was noticeable enough. When he'd heard that the museum was computerizing its security, and that the upper west wing was going to be the test location…well, he knew he'd have to try it out. It was going pretty damn well, all things considered.

A quick glance upward indicated that guards were starting to herd people away from the affected wing, and he sighed. He'd better get back upstairs, meet Nana and the others. The commotion would give him a little cover, but the bathrooms were upstairs and Nana was probably getting suspicious. According to his watch he still had another…six minutes…but there was no sense pushing his luck.

He disconnected the calculator quickly and tucked it into his back pocket, shoving the spare wires up into the phone and closing the access panel. None of the cameras were focused on the phones—why would they be?—and after giving all the flat surfaces that he'd touched a quick wipe with the sleeve of his sweatshirt, he turned away . Somebody would override his override eventually, but until then he'd enjoy his chaos.

* * * * *

Not a man, Eliot realized as the figure began to move towards the near staircase and his hood slipped back off his head. A teenager, and a young one at that. Not even old enough to shave, by the look of things, although judging by the arms and legs that seemed almost too long for his body he was probably already as tall as Eliot.

The still-twitching hand made him shake his head. How in the _hell_ the kid was managing to make the alarms play whatever it was they were playing, Eliot didn't have the vaguest idea. Something to do with the computer system, probably. Computers had been around for awhile, but he hadn't paid them too much attention—they weren't exactly integral in his line of work, although they did crop up now and again, mostly in unpleasant ways—and what little he did know, he didn't much like. Like that article he'd seen on the museum's new alarm system…it hadn't even been _readable_ unless you were a certified geek. He just hoped the things wouldn't become too mainstream.

Eliot began to follow the railing around towards the stairway, keeping an eye on the kid as he did so. He was the only one here _not_ confused, which by definition made him the most dangerous person in the museum.

Absently he checked the ancient comb tucked into the inner pocket of his jacket. It wasn't the cleverest hiding place—if the guards decided to search anyone he'd have to get creative—but the comb was flat enough that it didn't stand out. With bone or wood he would have needed to be more careful, but ancient or not the damn thing _was_ made of stone.

Security was still concentrating on herding people out of the affected wing, and none of them spared Eliot so much as a glance as he reached the top of the stairs.

* * * * *

Something made the hair on the back of Alec's neck stand on end, and he looked up and around quickly. Mostly people were looking at the alarms going off or headed for the stairs—either to go down, away from the alarms, or to go up and see what was happening—but one guy caught his eye. He was standing at the top of the staircase, looking over the railing with more intensity than he should have been given that most of the action was happening behind him. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a faded jacket hanging loose across his shoulders, nothing that stood out as unusual, but the way his hair was cut Alec guessed he was some kind of military. Army, maybe, or Marine.

Their eyes locked, suddenly, and Alec flinched back instinctively at the glare the man gave him. He might live with Nana now, but he hadn't always, and some of Mama's 'friends'…well, he'd seen looks like that before. The man wasn't a giant—compared to the rest of the museum patrons around him he wasn't exactly _small_, but he didn't look like a bodybuilder either—but that look meant that Alec needed to be somewhere else. Like _right now_.

* * * * *

Eliot tensed as the kid looked up, locking eyes with him. He began to shift backwards automatically—as much as he couldn't afford to be noticed, he wasn't the kind of guy who went around beating up kids, either—but the boy abruptly lowered his eyes, shoved his hands into his pockets, and began to hurry down one of the side halls with his shoulders hunched.

For a moment Eliot considered cutting him off, but there was no real reason to. The kid had no cause to think he'd done anything—and considering his own actions, even if he _had_ suspected Eliot of anything, he'd probably keep his mouth shut just to keep from implicating himself—and this way he was out of the way.

With another casual glance around Eliot resumed his journey down the stairs. Down and out and he'd be at the airport and on a plane in an hour. The money would be in his hands in three.

* * * * *

Alec was relieved to see that the man was gone as he came up the back stairway and cut through the still-hacked gallery to get back to Nana and the others. Security was trying to keep people out, but there were enough bystanders rubbernecking that it wasn't too hard to get past them. There had been something off about that man, something just _wrong_….

"Hey, that case is empty!" a woman called suddenly, and Alec was shoved sideways none too gently as the security man who'd been at the top of the front staircase rushed towards the shout.

"No way." He turned to look over the railing and saw the man with the cropped hair and faded jacket moving towards the door. It couldn't be. Right?

* * * * *

The radio clipped to the belt of the one security man who'd remained by the front door throughout the commotion came to life suddenly, and Eliot heard news of his theft reported through the static. They didn't seem to know what was missing yet, but they knew something was up, and he glanced casually back over his shoulder. Again, no one seemed to be paying him any particular attention. Well, with the exception of a dark skinned teenager in a hooded sweatshirt who now stood at the railing of the upper balcony, fingers tapped lightly on the railing in time with the music. That was one _weird_ kid.

The remaining security man was still barking into his radio as Eliot stepped out into the sunlight and hailed a cab for the airport.

* * * * *

The man with the cropped hair was almost to the doorway now, but he turned back for some reason, and once again they locked eyes. He'd done it, Alec was almost sure—he'd robbed a freaking _museum_—but…well, what was he supposed to say? 'I messed up your alarms, but that guy stole your stuff'? Yeah, that would go over well. The man's eyes narrowed into another glare that made Alec flinch back, and he took his hands off the railing and turned quickly to go in search of Nana and the others. That was one _warped_ dude.

Nana gave him a bit of hell for being gone so long—Anna and Marie had come straight back from the bathroom, of course—but getting to play hell with the security system was more than worth it.


	2. Don't Fake a Miracle

_This was originally written as a quick snippet set that I wasn't planning to post, but I had a couple requests for an addition to One Weird, One Warped where Eliot and Hardison realize that they'd run into each other before so I decided to go ahead and combine the two._

_  
For the purposes of this story, they didn't recognize each other when they met in The Nigerian Job—in One Weird, One Warped Hardison was a teenager, Eliot had a buzz cut, and they only saw each other for a minute or so _total_, so without something to trigger it, I don't think they would have. _

_This is set during The Miracle Job, and the lines in italics are taken directly out of the show._

* * _*_ * *

"_So, what, now you're religious too?" Eliot asked._

_Hardison shook his head. "No, no, I'm not denominational. It's just I just never do anything my nana said 'don't do'."_

* * * * *

"Don't fake a miracle?" Eliot asked, matching paces with Hardison as they left the office. Nate had suggested a couple potential miracles, but which ones would work depended on the props available in the church, and none of them had really been examining the décor the last time they were there. Well, possibly excepting Parker, but she was always looking for something new to steal.

Hardison twisted and gave him a look. "Isn't that what Nate just told us to do?' He shook his head, adding in a mutter, "As crazy and immoral and _bad_ as the idea is."

Considering the various…activities…the team was involved in, Eliot didn't think any of them—Nate included—had any business trying to take the high ground, but he just shook his head. "Nah, I mean what the hell kind of kid were you that your nana had to _tell_ you not to go around faking miracles?" He climbed into his SUV and started the engine, waiting until Hardison buckled himself in on the passenger side before pulling out into traffic. "I mean, 'don't lie', 'don't cheat', 'don't steal', sure, those make sense. I'm guessing she must have missed them, somehow, seeing as you do all three on a regular basis, but…."

"Hey, man, don't dis my nana."

Eliot grinned. "'Don't do drugs', now there's another good one. But 'don't fake a miracle'?"

"For the record, it was mostly Luke's fault. I was just an innocent bystander."

Eliot snorted in disbelief, about to ask who Luke was when the radio station finally finished its string of commercials and started to play some actual music. And Hardison reached for the dial. Without thinking, he reached out and smacked Hardison's fingers.

"Ow! Hey!"

He cradled his 'injured' hand, and Eliot rolled his eyes. "My ride, my music."

"That isn't music," Hardison grumbled. "That's some old guy singing through his nose about his pickup truck."

* * * * *

"Ow!" Hardison left off protecting his hand and rubbed his shoulder. The punch hadn't really hurt—as much damage as he'd seen Eliot do to _other_ people, he'd never been on the receiving end of anything that even left bruises—but it was the principle of the thing. "Anybody ever tell you that violence doesn't solve anything?"

Eliot ignored him, which didn't really come as a surprise, and he debated going for the radio again. Except that Eliot was faster, so unless there was something to distract him with….

The radio switched back to commercials—after one lousy song—and he made a mental note to hook Eliot up with satellite radio. Or at least introduce the guy to mp3 players. Even _country_ was better than ads for mops and homeowners insurance. This time it was Eliot who reached out and changed the channel, and he leaned back in his seat a little more as _Moonlight Sonata_ began to play. Still not exactly his music of choice, but definitely an improvement.

"Who's Luke?"

He looked over at Eliot. "Huh?"

"Whoever you're blaming 'don't fake a miracle' on."

"Oh." He waved a hand. "This foster brother I had once. Was the one who really got me into computers, which was cool, but, man, talk about _trouble_."

Eliot seemed mildly interested, so he shrugged and continued. They had a good twenty minutes before they'd get to the church.

"See, it was maybe a couple months after I got placed with Nana. Luke and I shared a room—she only had two spare rooms, so there were usually two kids in each—and he had a couple of these really old monitors and towers and shit that he'd pulled out of people's trash scattered around. Kicked my ass a couple times for messing with them, but when he figured out that I was actually pretty good at getting them working again, he stopped getting so mad about it." He shook his head, remembering a teenager that had scoffed watching him trying to straighten pins with his stubby little fingers and then finally showed him how to do it correctly with a pair of pliers.

He shook his head again and continued with the story. "So, anyway, Nana used to drag us all to church every Sunday, and none of us really liked it much. It was this stuffy little church that always smelled kind of funny, and the minister would just go on and _on_. Seriously, he could talk for _hours_ when he wanted to."

Eliot muttered something that sounded vaguely like 'sounds familiar,' but when Hardison glared at him he just gave him an innocent look. "What?"

Hardison glared again, just for good measure. "_Anyway_, the choir was pretty terrible too. Like cover your ears terrible. Unfortunately Nana had been going to church there since she was a little girl, so we were stuck with it. Now, there wasn't an organ or anything like that, but there was this really ancient piano that the choir sang with. You know, one of the big ones where you can open up the back and make it look fancy? One time when Nana was helping to organize a social and she'd brought us along to help, Luke and I rigged up some sensors and put them under some of the keys and then ran the wires out the back and then up the wall into attic."

He snorted. _Wires_. It seemed ridiculously primitive when he thought about it now. "It was really more of a crawlspace than an attic, and he couldn't fit up there, but I could so he boosted me up and then handed up one of his old computers. One with working speakers and a few pre-recorded messages. I got it hooked up like he showed me, and then every time one of the keys we rigged was pressed, the voice of God speaking from above had something to say about it."

* * * * *

Eliot shook his head slightly. His own memories of church were pretty fuzzy—they'd stopped going after Mama had died, although Eileen had started again in college—but he vaguely remembered a large, airy building with brightly colored glass in the windows and being forced to wear shiny black shoes that had pinched his toes. "I think my Mama would have murdered me for a stunt like that."

"Oh, when Nana finally figured out that Luke and I were the ones that did it—I think the hysterical laughter when God ordered the choir to shut up gave it away—she just about did. 'Boy, you don't go around faking no miracles, you hear me?!' Damn near twisted my ear off. Plus we had to spend our Saturdays for _months_ scrubbing out the church top to bottom." He made a face. "Or at least _I_ did; Luke turned eighteen, so I was the one who got stuck with all the work. Trouble, like I said."

"How come being eighteen let him out of the work?" He'd done plenty of work around the farm at eighteen, before he'd finally gotten frustrated and left—if he hadn't, he'd sure as hell have heard about it.

Hardison gave him a strange look. "He aged out of the system."

"What?"

"We were in foster care."

"Yeah, I got that much." He wouldn't have guessed it before Hardison brought it up, but then he didn't really know much about the history of any of the Leverage team, except Nate. And that something had gone seriously wrong with Parker. But he didn't understand what foster care had to do with getting out of trouble, although from the way Hardison said it he thought that it explained everything.

"Well, he turned eighteen and left Nana's." Hardison shrugged slightly. "I never saw him again after that. He left most of the computer stuff behind for me, though, which was cool."

"Couldn't you use the computer find him?" He was pretty sure Hardison could find just about anybody like that. It was kind of disturbing when he thought about it, so mostly he didn't.

"Back then, no. Not with the setup I had, anyway. _Now_ I probably could, but…." He opened his mouth and then shut it again. "Sometimes it's just better not to."

"Huh." Eliot wasn't stupid and decided to change the subject. "So what did the voice of God have to say?"

"Um…well, there were a couple standard Bible verses to start with. Nothing major, but you should have seen the look on the minister's face when we started hearing them during the choir songs. Man, that was funny. Then there was 'Thou shalt shut up,' which is the one that gave us away. I think there was one about letting us all rest in peace too, and…what was the other one? Something about wise men speaking little that was supposed to be a hint to the minister to hurry it up. I don't remember, Luke was the one who made the recordings, and we didn't get to hear all of them."

* * * * *

Hardison was glad that Eliot let the subject of why he hadn't found Luke again drop as quickly as he had. It wasn't that it was any real secret, but it wasn't something that he thought Eliot would understand, either. Parker, of all of them, probably would, but not someone who'd grown up with _one_ set of parents. He shook his head slightly.

He'd done a decent amount of hacking into the pasts of most of the Leverage team when they'd first started working together, out of curiosity as much as anything. He'd tracking down quite a few aliases—and what he strongly suspected were real names in a couple cases—and although there was a curious blank in the-man-currently-known-as-Eliot-Spencer's history between ages eighteen and twenty-four, and not much after that, he was pretty sure that the trail _before_ that, back to a Kentucky farm, was solid. Not that he ever planned to ask, or even admit what he'd found out, but….

He shook his head again. He'd been lucky to be able to stay with Nana as long as he had, but she'd been neither his first nor his last foster mother, and with the constant flow of foster parents and siblings he'd learned early that it was best to just let them go when it was time to move on, rather than try to hold on to something that he could never keep.

"Hey, do you think you could rig something like that up here?" Eliot asked. "With slightly more…appropriate…messages?"

Hardison returned his focus to their conversation. "Nah, man, no way. People know too much about audio systems now; even with a wireless setup they'd never buy it." He shook his head again. "No, it's got to be something _new_." He slid down a little further in the passenger seat, stretching out his legs as best he could as a new song came on. "Maybe…."

He trailed off, staring out the window. The voice of God would never work. But…maybe apparitions? Angels? There had been Star Trek, though, and holograms, and besides, that would require setup that was hard to hide.

* * * * *

Eliot frowned as he watched long, dark fingers twitch in time with the music. Something was nagging at his memory, but he couldn't quite place it. It couldn't be recent—not much had happened recently, outside the jobs Nate had picked for them; he hadn't even picked up any freelance work on his own for months. Fingers twitching…fingers tapping…and— "How old were you?" he demanded suddenly.

Hardison looked over at him, obviously startled out of his train of thought. "What?"

"When you started with computers, how old were you?"

"Uh, about ten, I guess." He shrugged slightly. "Why?"

Eliot shook his head. The last movement of Beethoven's Ninthand twitching fingers. "It was you, wasn't it?"

"What?" Hardison asked again.

He did the math quickly, double-checking himself, but it seemed to work out. At a guess, Hardison was somewhere around ten years younger than himself. Possibly a little more, possibly a little less, but ten was good enough for a rough estimate. That would have made him about fifteen in the museum—a teenager, but already tall—and with five years of playing with computers behind him, Eliot had no doubt that Hardison would have been capable of messing with a newly-installed alarm system. "It _was_ you."

Hardison shifted to sit up straight, still staring at him. "Man, I have _no_ idea what you're talking about."

"In the museum." He slapped his hand against the wheel. "You just about screwed up my job!"

* * * * *

Hardison kept his back against the window, trying to figure out what Eliot was blaming him for. He was fairly used to Eliot's bizarre flares of temper by now—fortunately they cooled as quickly as they came—but usually he had some idea of what Eliot was mad _about_. This….

He frowned. He generally did his work from hotel rooms or temporary homes, places where he could work in quiet and that couldn't be traced back to him. He couldn't even _remember_ the last time he'd been inside a museum. Well, there had been that thing in Cairo, but he'd just been collecting information at the time. He hadn't actually done anything except see the sights. He shook his head.

"You made the alarms play this," Eliot declared, jabbing a finger at the speaker.

"I did _what_?" He started at the speaker for a minute, the music not really registering. Why would he make alarms play anything? Usually the only thing he wanted to do with alarms was turn them off—or, occasionally, go off elsewhere as a distraction while he hooked something up to a computer system that he hadn't been able to access remotely. He blinked, recognizing the fast run in _Ode to Joy_. When would he have made alarms play that?

"In the museum," Eliot repeated. "The Museum of Natural History, back in—"

Hardison's eyes widened as he stared at Eliot, not hearing the rest of his words. _Ode to Joy_. Anna, and the alarms, and the Incas, and the frightening man with the cropped hair who'd stolen one of the museum exhibits. "Holy _shit_. That was you, wasn't it?" He had a hard time replacing Eliot's shoulder-length hair with a buzz cut in his mind, but from what he remembered their features matched. And his glare was just about the same as the man's as well—_that_ Hardison had seen plenty since they'd started working together. "I didn't screw up your job, you screwed up my test!" When he'd learned that something had definitely been stolen, he'd worried for _weeks_ afterwards that someone would remember seeing him doing by the phones and blame him for it.

* * * * *

Hardison glared at him, and Eliot glared right back. "Well, what kind of kid goes around turning an alarm system into his personal jukebox?"

"_Jukebox? Seriously?_" Hardison retorted. "And I'm not the one who was trying to _rob_ the museum, was I?"

"You were one weird kid." Glare.

"Yeah, well you were one warped dude." Glare.

"Shit!"

Eliot stamped on the break and swerved as Hardison yelped, barely missing the car that had cut them off, too close even for this city. "_Idiot!_ You all right?"

"Yeah." Hardison looked a little shaken, but his voice was strong. "You?"

Eliot nodded. "Some people shouldn't have licenses." He shook his head, turning down the road the church was on. That little rush of adrenaline had pretty neatly interrupted him and Hardison's argument, and he didn't feel like picking it back up again. Just now, anyway. "So what kind of miracle are we going to fake?"

"Man, I don't know." Hardison didn't seem at all concerned with the new topics, but then considering how fast he could change focus that probably shouldn't have been a surprise. "Nate says make a statue bleed, so maybe that. Or stigmata. I could probably do pretty good stigmata."

Eliot slipped the car into an empty spot neatly, and he and Hardison matched paces into the church. He waved at a figure with its arms upraised. "I guess that's the statue Nate was talking about."

Hardison nodded slightly. "Yep." He walked over and knocked on its face lightly. "But no way I can make a solid piece of stone do anything; it's going to enough of a bitch just to move it out of the way so we can replace it with ours. Can you get me some plaster?"

He shrugged. Nate had said to get Hardison what he needed. "Sure."

"And blood."

Eliot opened his mouth and then shut it again.

"And maybe a paintball gun…." Hardison tapped his lip lightly. "Yeah, that ought to do it."

Blood made sense, even if he wasn't sure how he was going to acquire it yet…he really didn't want to _know_ what Hardison planned to do with a paintball gun. He really didn't want to be in _front_ of Hardison if he had a paintball gun. "All right."

"Oh, and I could use—" Hardison frowned, pulling a laptop out of his bag. "What was it called, again?" He waved a hand. "I'll look it up, you go ahead and get the rest and I'll call you when I find it."

Eliot nodded and turned to head back out to the car. "You're still weird, you know that?"

* * * * *

Hardison ignored Eliot's grumbling, bringing up his research. Where was it? He knew he'd seen an article on it somewhere…it reacted with smoke to create liquid, which would be perfect for tears—

"Hey, Hardison?" Eliot interrupted, sticking his head back in the door.

"What?"

"You need to go out for anything, stay on the main streets."

Hardison rolled his eyes and waved an acknowledgement. Like he'd do otherwise, especially in this neighborhood. Eliot would, but then, Eliot was still warped.

.


End file.
